Welcome to your jazz piano journey! Playing jazz is an incredibly rewarding skill, and we have a fantastic roadmap ahead that will take you from the very basics all the way to improvising over classic tunes.

Before we dive in, let me know a bit about your musical background so we can pace things perfectly for you.

Since you already have classical and pop under your fingers, you're in a fantastic position. You already understand how to read music and coordinate your hands, which means we can skip the absolute basics and get straight to the good stuff.

In jazz, everything we build—from lush chords to blazing improvised solos—relies on knowing our intervals cold. An interval is simply the distance between two notes, and in jazz, we don't just think of them as distances; we think of them as the DNA of chord formulas.

Before we look at the keyboard, let's make sure we are on the same page with how we count these. Instead of just counting lines and spaces on a staff, jazz players count by half steps (semitones) to get the exact, precise distance between notes.

For instance, if you start on C and move up 4 half steps (C to C#, D, D#, E), you land on E. That specific distance of 4 half steps is called a Major 3rd. If you only moved up 3 half steps (C to Eb), that's a Minor 3rd.

Let's do a quick mental check to see how comfortable you are counting these. If you start on the note D and count up exactly 7 half steps, which note do you land on?